Kids Program Robots to Save Indigenous Languages

In a robotics lab in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, 12-year-old Holden Hoy is building a robot to help him learn the Ojibwe language. His creation, a shoulder-mounted droid named Sabe (the Ojibwe word for Bigfoot), responds to voice commands in Anishinaabemowin — an Indigenous language with fewer than 10,000 fluent speakers remaining in the United States.

Holden is part of a growing movement led by Danielle Boyer, a 25-year-old inventor and member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Boyer designed the SkoBot — a wearable, 3D-printed robot that teaches endangered Indigenous languages to children through hands-on robotics. The program, run through her nonprofit The STEAM Connection, has distributed more than 8,000 kits to tribal schools across the country.

A Toy That Speaks the Language of Home

Boyer’s inspiration struck in a toy store while watching a Tickle Me Elmo doll speak and teach in English. “There are toys that teach us in English, but there aren’t toys that teach us Anishinaabemowin,” she told NPR. “And I wanted that to be different.”

The SkoBots are deliberately low-tech. They use motion sensors and pre-recorded audio from real community speakers — not generative AI or synthetic speech. When a child asks, for example, “What is bear?” the robot responds with the Anishinaabemowin word “makwa” from a library of pre-recorded files. As Hackaday reported, each kit costs roughly $20 to produce and is provided free to tribal school partners.

“There isn’t synthetic speech, there isn’t any generative AI,” Boyer explained. “It’s simply listening to what you’re saying, identifying it and playing audio files that already exist.”

Why This Matters: Language at the Brink

More than a third of the world’s roughly 6,700 languages are at risk of extinction, according to UNESCO. In North America, only about 20 Native American languages are expected to survive past 2050. Anishinaabemowin has fewer than 10,000 speakers in the U.S. Some languages have just a few dozen fluent speakers left.

This crisis is rooted in a dark history. U.S. Indian boarding schools, operating from the late 1800s through the 1960s, forcibly separated Native children from their families and punished them for speaking their ancestral languages. Boyer’s grandmother is one of the last fluent speakers of her dialect.

“It is devastating to feel like your language could be lost,” Boyer said. “You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are.”

A Deliberately Ethical Approach to AI

While large language models like ChatGPT have begun offering translations in some Indigenous languages, Boyer and other Indigenous technologists warn that these tools often produce inaccurate or culturally harmful content. The Smithsonian Magazine reported on cases where AI-generated books claiming to teach the Abenaki language appeared on Amazon with fabricated words and incorrect translations. In late 2024, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe filed a lawsuit over the exploitation of Lakota language materials.

“Artificial intelligence, especially when it’s not created by Indigenous people, stands to do a lot of harm to our communities,” Boyer said.

Boyer’s approach prioritizes data sovereignty: The STEAM Connection never owns, publishes, or profits from language recordings. Community speakers retain full control over their knowledge. Teachers can rescind their recordings at any time.

This ethical framework has attracted widespread recognition. Boyer has been invited to the White House and featured in national media. Her work is part of a broader movement of Indigenous-led technology initiatives, including the First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR) project in Quebec and the Masheli chatbot for the Choctaw language.

‘The Language Is the Culture’

At JKL Bahweting Anishinaabe School in Sault Ste. Marie, Holden Hoy’s Sabe robot was the star of the school’s STEAM Museum science fair. The robot — decorated with Native floral designs — detects motion, listens for trigger words, and plays appropriate responses in Anishinaabemowin. Hoy programmed it to introduce itself in his own voice.

“I was already a big fan of robotics,” Hoy said. “And I’m Ojibwe, and so I’ve always wanted to save the Ojibwe language.”

His mother, Jocelyn Hoy, said the program has sparked a new interest in their heritage. “As someone who, at a time in my life, did not want to be identified as Native American … now as an adult, I cannot wait to learn more,” she said.

Holden put it more simply: “The language is the culture!”

What’s Next

The SkoBot program continues to operate on a case-by-case basis, often self-funded and driven by community demand. Boyer’s long-term vision includes professional PCB development and injection molding to scale production, but the robots will never be sold commercially — they remain free for tribal schools.

Research shows that connection to ancestral language correlates with lower rates of youth suicide, diabetes, and alcohol abuse among Indigenous populations. Programs like SkoBot offer a dual benefit: preserving endangered languages while engaging young people in STEM education.

For Boyer, the work is about more than technology. “Our languages are living things,” she said. “Our languages need to have community relationships. It can’t be pure technology.”